Despite her restlessness wanderlust Idelle chose to wait and think, sprawled among the blood-stained pine needles and dirt, instead of setting off again immediately after her hunt. Well, her hunt of sorts, at least. That was the problem she wanted to tackle, as the brawl with the dire wolves had made a couple of things clear.

Most important was her growing realization that she didn’t actually have any idea how to use her mess of skills and abilities cohesively. Her skill with her sword was competent enough, if not amazing, based on what she’d seen with Ivar and in her acquired memories. But it was very basic and generalized, focusing on simple motions and footwork, and intended for a lighter blade than the one she’d ended up with.

Meanwhile, her body’s strength and speed were far above the norm, maybe even accounting for body enhancement, and she suspected she was above average in harder to quantify ways, as well, such as her reflexes and ability to follow fast motions with her eyes. She wondered if there was a name for that. Visual tracking?

Oh, and on the subject of body enhancement, she hadn’t really been using that at all. She vaguely remembered using it when she attacked Cecilia, and in the later encounter with the being under the city, but thinking back to it now those fights felt uncomfortably distant. Impersonal, even, but in a different way than the foreign memories she had.

Idelle winced at the thought. She really hadn’t been in a good mental state, had she? Something else to work on.

She pulled her thoughts back on topic. Body enhancement. And magic in general, for that matter. Even without anything more complicated, she could imagine using flashes of light or manipulating sand or dust to blind someone or distract them, to potentially lethal effect…

Her face fell into a grimace. It was easier said than done. Even discounting the difficulties of casting magic while focusing on something else, it was clear that just staying on her feet during a fight was a struggle. Actually, had she had a single fight up ‘till now where she hadn’t been knocked down at some point? Even during Ivar’s advanced sword class, she’d found herself hitting the ground once or twice.

She supposed that this must mean progress, of some kind, but with the number of times that she’d almost tripped she found it hard to imagine this would be the end of it.

Anyway. She should focus on trying to practice and integrate a few things at a time, to keep things manageable. Idelle’s eyes fell to the intertwined moons decorating the pommel of her sword. Her reflection gazed back at her from the blade, her eyes seeming to shine slightly in the twilight as they peeked out from under a dark mess of bangs.

She frowned again, though it must have been too subtle to show on her impassive reflection. Another side effect of her powers? Didn’t wolves have eyes that shone like that in the dark? One more thing to try and keep track of.

She let the sword swing back and forth in a little dance. Regardless of its origins, she would be an idiot to not focus on it — for now at least. When hunting cursed beasts outdoors, at least, the reach it gave her was invaluable, and it had proven itself able to take the beating inflicted by her abnormal strength without issues. So far, at least.

Her eyes fell on her hands, and she carefully lifted one of them from the hilt. She focused on it, trying to remember the sensation she’d felt earlier. It’d come to her instinctually in the moment, but the ease with which her nails had shifted into claws seemed to have vanished.

Idelle concentrated harder. She had the right feeling, she was sure of it, but it felt like something was missing. The seconds stretched out into a minute, and then two, but there was no success. She thought back to the moment in the fight. Her heart had been racing, panic rising as she tried to deal with the wolf quickly before its companion could arrive.

And then it’d just… happened, naturally, as if someone had turned a key and unlocked a door that she hadn’t even realized she was trying to open.

Finally, she gave up. She wasn’t sure why, but that particular door seemed to be locked again, at least for now. She supposed that maybe it was for the best — as useful as the ability was for fighting up close, she was leery of relying on it when she didn’t know if she should expose it around other people. Who knew how they might react, she was already (apparently) creepy enough.

Still, it would be useful to have something to rely on when her sword was too long to be useful. She resolved to find a knife when she had a chance. It’d be useful to have as a tool anyway and offer her a modicum more protection when she inevitably would be unable to carry around her oversized greatsword.

There was a repetitive tap of her foot against the ground, and Idelle realized she had started impatiently fidgeting with her leg. Maybe it was time she moved on. There was still light left, and she was more confident than ever in her ability to see even after sunset. She decided she could think further on the road if she wanted.

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Moments later, she’d picked back up her pack and was striding purposefully off again, headed just left of the jagged mountain that the sun had recently hidden behind.

…

Despite her hesitation around using her nose, Idelle stumbled upon several more monsters to hunt over the next few days. Most of them were easy kills, even relatively dangerous animals like the magically mutated brown bear who found her late one night were unable to get past the deadly reach of her sword, much less lone smaller predators and the occasional cursed herbivore.

The only exception was a terrifyingly fast snake, who struck at her from its hiding place between a pair of uneven rocks as she clambered over them. She only narrowly managed to throw herself away, half falling onto her rear in the process before she brought her sword down to decapitate it.

Idelle wasn’t actually totally sure how venomous that particular breed of snake normally was, and half wondered if venom resistance mightn’t come with her enhanced body anyway, but she had no intention of testing either of those questions out any time soon if she could help it.

Still, the encounters kept her constantly on her toes. She found herself settling into a rhythm of only sleeping for an hour or two at a time, and only after searching the area for any strong traces of the sweet tainted scents that marked magic beasts. Her body didn’t seem to mind, and she covered the distance south along the mountains at a truly prodigious rate because of it.

She used the extra time to continue practicing her magic as well and finally found herself catching the hang of maintaining two charms at once, to her delight. It would still take a lot of practice to sustain for more than a second or two, but she was definitely moving in the right direction.

It was nearing dusk about a week after she split from the caravan that the next notable incident occurred.

It had grown drier as Idelle moved south, and the tall ensembles of pines and other straight evergreens had been reduced to a few stragglers hiding amidst clumps of junipers and other smaller trees. She was humming her half-remembered tune to herself in high spirits, having comfortably put down and fed on yet another wolf earlier that day. Maybe she had an affinity with them? They were hunters too, after all. And, when she thought about it, it wasn’t like they had any choice in the matter either. It was just in their nature to eat meat.

Maybe that was how it was for her, too, she thought to herself. Except, you know, with blood instead of meat. She could eat meat, but she could eat vegetables too.

Her meandering thoughts were interrupted by a sudden flicker in the distance. She squinted at it for a moment, seeing nothing, and only after a long moment of seeing nothing did she realize.

It wasn’t a flicker of light, but of her now almost omnipresent magic-sight.

The disturbance grew closer, and suddenly she found herself gripped by panic. Whatever it was approached her through the sky at a terrifying speed, and as it grew closer the flicker of its magic seemed to grow along with it into a great raging ball.

Something in her quailed at its presence, a foreign instinct that whispered that this thing was too powerful, too sovereign for ordinary creatures like her that crawled and crept upon the ground. Annoyance swelled in her at the notion, demanding that she make the creature her prey as was her right, but she quickly quashed it and flattened herself against the ground under the branches of the nearest tree.

Her instincts could argue all they wanted, but she knew intellectually that that was too much for her to handle.

A second later, the creature swept overhead, high above the trees but enormous enough to seem huge despite that. She caught a glimpse of enormous wings, of talons large enough to wrap around her body and then some matched with a pair of great clawed paws, a long tail that swept snakelike through the air behind it, and most unsettlingly a flash of a black eye nestled amidst mottled feathers that narrowed into a great curved beak.

The eye seemed to linger on her for a moment and she pressed herself deeper into the dirt, uncaring of the needles and branches that scratched against her face and arms.

Then it was gone, sweeping away north and back into the mountains as quickly as it came.

Idelle sat there, watching it go. A griffin. That was a griffin, right?

She had wanted to fight one of those? Were they all that big? Surely not, right? Cateline wouldn’t have expected people like her to go up against something like that with nothing but spears and bravery.

And she’d wanted to feed on it too. She shuddered, remembering the way the magic in the blood of the creature under Wyrlet had burned inside her, even when it had already been weakened to nearly nothing by that strange poison. The griffin’s magic had been comparable. Lesser, maybe, but comparable. She couldn’t imagine that it would make for a much more comfortable meal.

But… If she kept growing stronger off lesser beings first…

She let the thought pass for now. No use getting ahead of herself. It’s not like she had even the slimmest chance of hunting something like that as she was, anyway.

Don’t underestimate yourself.

She blinked. Where had that thought come from? Was it really underestimating herself to recognize that she would be nothing more than a worm in front of a sparrow to that monster?

Well. She supposed worms couldn’t exactly grow into something stronger. Maybe she was more like a caterpillar or some other larva, gifted with the chance to change herself, to be reborn as someone better.

The odd idea still gave her a spark of joy and confidence, and as the last flickers of the griffin’s magic faded into the background she quickly scrambled out from her hiding place and started off south again, breaking into a jog in her haste. She was glad that it had been flying in the opposite direction of her heading.